diff --git a/src/main/resources/spring/business-config.xml b/src/main/resources/spring/business-config.xml
index 5cc8bd2..7117ca2 100644
--- a/src/main/resources/spring/business-config.xml
+++ b/src/main/resources/spring/business-config.xml
@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@
 
     <!-- Configurer that replaces ${...} placeholders with values from a properties file -->
     <!-- (in this case, JDBC-related settings for the JPA EntityManager definition below) -->
-    <context:property-placeholder location="classpath:spring/data-access.properties"/>
+    <context:property-placeholder location="classpath:spring/data-access.properties" system-properties-mode="OVERRIDE"/>
 
      <!-- enables scanning for @Transactional annotations -->
     <tx:annotation-driven />
diff --git a/src/main/resources/spring/datasource-config.xml b/src/main/resources/spring/datasource-config.xml
index 0151d27..5cd214b 100644
--- a/src/main/resources/spring/datasource-config.xml
+++ b/src/main/resources/spring/datasource-config.xml
@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
 
     <!-- Configurer that replaces ${...} placeholders with values from a properties file -->
     <!-- (in this case, JDBC-related settings for the dataSource definition below) -->
-    <context:property-placeholder location="classpath:spring/data-access.properties"/>
+    <context:property-placeholder location="classpath:spring/data-access.properties" system-properties-mode="OVERRIDE"/>
 
     <!-- DataSource configuration for the tomcat jdbc connection pool 
     See here for more details on commons-dbcp versus tomcat-jdbc: